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Religious thought and behaviour as

by-products of brain function
Pascal Boyer
Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, Washington University in St Louis, MO 63130, St Louis, USA

Religious concepts activate various functionally distinct

mental systems, present also in non-religious contexts,
and tweak the usual inferences of these systems. They
deal with detection and representation of animacy and
agency, social exchange, moral intuitions, precaution
against natural hazards and understanding of misfortune. Each of these activates distinct neural resources
or families of networks. What makes notions of supernatural agency intuitively plausible? This article reviews
evidence suggesting that it is the joint, coordinated
activation of these diverse systems, a supposition that
opens up the prospect of a cognitive neuroscience of
religious beliefs.
Religious beliefs and practices are found in all human
groups. What makes religion so natural? A common
temptation is to search for the origin of religion in general
human urges, for instance in peoples wish to escape
misfortune or mortality or their desire to understand the
universe. However, these accounts are often based on
incorrect views about religion (see Table 1) and the
psychological urges are often merely postulated [1,2].
Recent findings in psychology, anthropology and neuroscience offer a more empirical approach, focused on the
mental machinery activated in acquiring and representing
religious concepts [1,3 7]. This approach suggests three
crucial changes to common views of religion:
(1) Most of the relevant mental machinery is not
consciously accessible. Peoples explicitly held, consciously accessible beliefs, as in other domains of
cognition, only represent a fragment of the relevant
processes. Experimental tests show that peoples
actual religious concepts often diverge from what
they believe they believe [8]. This is why theologies,
explicit dogmas, scholarly interpretations of religion
cannot be taken as a reliable description of either the
contents or the causes of peoples beliefs [9];
(2) What makes religious thoughts natural might be the
operation of a whole collection of distinct mental
systems rather than a unique, specific process;
(3) In each of these systems religious thoughts are not a
dramatic departure from, but a predictable byproduct of, ordinary cognitive function.
In the past five years, substantial progress has been
Corresponding author: Pascal Boyer (pboyer@artsci.wustl.edu).

made in the description of these different systems and

their contribution to the naturalness of religious beliefs.
A limited catalogue of the supernatural
Religious notions are products of the supernatural
imagination. To some extent, they owe their salience
(likelihood of activation) and transmission potential to
features that they share with other supernatural concepts,
such as found in dreams, fantasy, folktales and legends.
This might be why one finds recurrent templates in
religion despite many variations between cultures (see
Table 1 on misleading notions about cultural similarities
and differences). Imagination in general is strongly
constrained [10]. Supernatural concepts are informed by
very general assumptions from domain concepts such as
person, living thing, man-made object [11,12]. A spirit is a
special kind of person, a magic wand a special kind of
artefact, a talking tree a special kind of plant. Such notions
are salient and inferentially productive because they
combine (i) specific features that violate some default
expectations for the domain with (ii) expectations held by
default as true of the entire domain [9] (see Fig. 1).
For example, the familiar concept of a ghost combines
(i) socially transmitted information about a physically
counter-intuitive person (disembodied, can go through
walls, etc.), and (ii) spontaneous inferences afforded by the

Ghost entered room

through the wall!!!!!
Person
+ counter-intuitive physics
Spirits never die!!!!!
Person
+ counter-intuitive biology
This statue will listen
to your prayers!!!!!
Artefact
+ animacy, psychology
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Fig. 1. Culturally widespread supernatural concepts (only the most frequent are
represented here) correspond to a small number of templates that combine [a]
activation of a domain concept with its default assumptions and [b] culturally
transmitted, limited violations of expectations for that domain.

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Table 1. Dos and donts in the study of religion

Do not say

But say

Religion answers peoples metaphysical questions

Religious thoughts are typically activated when people deal with concrete
situations (this crop, that disease, this new birth, this dead body, etc.)
It is about a variety of agents: ghouls, ghosts, spirits, ancestors, gods, etc., in
direct interaction with people
It generates as much anxiety as it allays: vengeful ghosts, nasty spirits and
aggressive gods are as common as protective deities
There is no reason to think that the various kinds of thoughts we call religious all
appeared in human cultures at the same time
Most religious explanations of natural phenomena actually explain little but
produce salient mysteries
In places where religion is not invoked to explain them, such phenomena are not
seen as intrinsically mystical or supernatural
The notion of salvation is particular to a few doctrines (Christianity and doctrinal
religions of Asia and the Middle-East) and unheard of in most other traditions
Religious commitment can (under some conditions) be used as signal of
coalitional affiliation; but coalitions create social fission (secession) as often as
group integration
There are many irrefutable statements that no-one believes; what makes some of
them plausible to some people is what we need to explain
Commitment to imagined agents does not really relax or suspend ordinary
mechanisms of belief-formation; indeed it can provide important evidence for
their functioning (and therefore should be studied attentively)

Religion is about a transcendent God

Religion allays anxiety
Religion was created at time t in human history
Religion is about explaining natural phenomena
Religion is about explaining mental phenomena (dreams,
visions)
Religion is about mortality and the salvation of the soul
Religion creates social cohesion

Religious claims are irrefutable. That is why people believe

them
Religion is irrational/superstitious (therefore not worthy of
study)

general person concept (the ghost perceives what happens,

recalls what he or she perceived, forms beliefs on the basis
of such perceptions, and intentions on the basis of beliefs)
[13]. These combinations of explicit violation and tacit
inferences are culturally widespread and may constitute a
memory optimum [11]. Associations of this type are
recalled better than more standard associations but also
better than oddities that do not include domain-concept
violations [14,15]. The effect obtains regardless of exposure
to a particular kind of supernatural beliefs, and it has been
replicated in different cultures in Africa and Asia [14].
Informed agents and moral intuitions
A subset of the supernatural repertoire consists in
religious concepts proper, which are taken by many people
as, firstly, quite plausibly real and secondly, of great social
and personal importance. Religion is largely about intentional agents [3] that one does not physically encounter.
Far from being intrinsically irrational or delusive, the
capacity to imagine non-physically present agents and run
off-line social interaction with them can be said to be
characteristic of human cognition [16,17]. A good deal of
spontaneous reflection in humans focuses on past or future
social interaction and on counterfactual scenarios. This
capacity to run off-line social interaction is already
present in young children [18]. Thinking about supernatural agents certainly activates such off-line capacities,
although in a particular way because most information
about such agents is socially transmitted and they are seen
as quite real.
What psychological processes create this intuition of
actual presence? Some psychologists of religion emphasize
the role of salient personal experience, such as a vision or
trance (see Box 1). However, most religious people find
supernatural agents plausible without the benefit of such
experience. A possible explanation is that the representation of supernatural agents activates and modifies
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inference systems involved in the representation of

ordinary agents.
As an illustration, concepts of gods and ancestors with
whom you can interact require a minor but consequential tweaking of standard theory of mind. Normal adults
pass standard false-belief tests because they assume a
principle of imperfect information: that a situation s is
the case does not entail that all agents represent s
[19 21]. Social intelligence requires that we gauge other
agents true and false beliefs about the situation at hand.
But supernatural agents are represented as simpler
intentional agents. They are tacitly construed as
perfect-access intentional agents [22] (if s is the case,
then the god or spirit knows s).
Another illustration is the way supernatural agents are
involved in moral judgments. Moral intuitions bind a
particular type of social interaction with a specific feeling
[23,24], according to principles developed early in life [25].
The principles are implicit so that people often have
definite moral intuitions that they cannot entirely explain.
This explanatory background can be provided by religious
concepts. Gods and ancestors are sometimes represented
as legislators or moral exemplars but the most widespread connection with morality is that they are interested parties in moral judgments [6]. The ancestors know,
for instance, what you are up to, know you feel bad about it,
and know that it is bad; the spirits know that you are
generous, know how proud you feel and know that that is
praiseworthy. A default assumption in such inferences is
that gods and ancestors empathise with ones own moral
intuitions. Ones own moral feelings are made easier to
represent when construed as resulting from another
agents judgments, because of our intuitive capacity for
emotional empathy [26].
Misfortune and death
A popular explanation of religion is that people create gods
and spirits to explain misfortune, accidents and disease in

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Box 1. Trance vs. doctrine: does salient experience shape ordinary practice?
In many different places around the world, rituals induce what are called
altered states of consciousness: trance, possession, meditation, and so
on (Fig. I). The techniques include self-stimulation, visual fixation,
verbal satiation, hyper-ventilation, mood-enhancing or hallucinogenic
drugs, sensory deprivation, and music [67]. How do such techniques
contribute to the creation, spread and intuitive plausibility of religious
notions?
Psychologists of religion have often suggested that the specific
phenomenology of such states inform religious notions [68], and
propose the following causal links:
(1) specific brain events in a particular person lead to specific
experience of supernatural entities or agents;
(2) a mystics specific experience leads to that persons specific
concepts;
(3) the mystics concepts lead to the groups religious tradition.
This is the path taken in the modern study of altered states of
consciousness, including the very few experimental studies of their
neural underpinnings [66].
Such studies might one day be able to document causal links 1 and 2
above. But what about link 3? As anthropologists point out, most
religious concepts in most minds at most times in most cultures are built
on the basis of other peoples statements (e.g. the gods are awesome),
sometimes completed by some personal experience (e.g. feeling awed
at the thought of the gods), and very seldom accompanied by any
mystical experience (e.g. of feeling the presence of the god). So it is
difficult to say whether extraordinary experience really has much impact
on religious concepts. Many anthropologists argue that the phenomenology of altered states is intrinsically indeterminate. Culturally
transmitted concepts are required to give the experience any content
at all [69].
The production of exceptional experience could be part of what R.N.

particular, and that people need such explanations

because they misunderstand probability. Psychologists
have often described folk understandings of chance as
irrational [27] although this is in fact mostly confined to
situations where people represent the probability of a
single event (versus judging the relative frequencies of
multiple occurrences) [28]. Interestingly, many of the
events for which supernatural causes are invoked are
either represented as single events (e.g. death of a relative)
or repeated misfortune that deviates strongly from

Fig. I. Two contrasted aspects of religious practice: (a) exceptional experience

(here darwish Muslim mystic) and (b) routinized worship (Christians in the
Philippines).

McCauley and E.T. Lawson call the high sensory pageantry of rituals
that create exceptional emotional states, from elation to terror and from
intense pleasure to excruciating pain [70]. By contrast, many rituals are
based on repetitive lessons. Why this difference? For McCauley and
E.T. Lawson, high sensory rituals have supernatural agents acting; low
sensory rituals are those in which they are being acted upon. The two
ritual modes perhaps also use two distinct resources of human
memory: salient perceptually encoded autobiographical events versus
conceptually integrated scripts [71].

expected frequencies (e.g. this is the third time my

house has been hit by lightning).
This could explain why such events are remarkable but
not why agents are thought to be involved. A possible
explanation is that many cases of misfortune are represented in terms of social interaction in the first place,
whether the person is religious or not. This might be a byproduct of the hypertrophy of social intelligence in
humans, itself a reflection of how much human beings
depend on each other for survival [16]. Two facts seem to

Box 2. Magic, pollution, ritual and other obsessions

Magic and ritual the world over obsessively rehash the same themes, in
particular concerns about pollution and purity [] contact avoidance;
special ways of touching; fears about immanent, serious sanctions for
rule violations; a focus on boundaries and thresholds [72]. These
themes are also characteristic of obsessive compulsive disorder
(OCD). Indeed, the domains of magical ritual and personal obsessions
do not just share similar themes but also similar principles characteristic
of magical thinking [55]:
(1) dangerous elements or substances are invisible;
(2) any contact (touching, kissing, ingesting) with such substances is
dangerous;
(3) the amount of substance is irrelevant (e.g. a drop of a sick persons
saliva is just as dangerous as a cupful of the stuff).
Many situations to which people spontaneously apply these
principles include sources of pathogens and toxins: dirt, faeces, bugs,
diseased or decayed organisms. The three principles are particularly
apposite when dealing with such situations, as most pathogens are
invisible, use diverse vectors for transmission, and there is no dose
effect.
So magical thoughts could be an extension of inferences about
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contagion [73]. Rituals are often performed with a sense of urgency, an

intuition that great danger would be incurred by not performing them.
This particular emotional tenor of rituals might derive from their
association with neural systems dedicated to the detection and
avoidance of invisible hazards.
Further light is shed on this question by the study of OCD pathology.
Neuroimaging studies generally show a significant increase of activity
in the caudate nucleus in response to stimuli perceived as dangerous.
Specific activity modulation extends beyond the basal ganglia,
however, to a network comprising anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal
cortex as well as the caudate [57,74]. The pathology might consist in a
failure to inhibit or keep off-line a set of normal neural reactions to
potential sources of danger.
We are still far from understanding to what extent this network is also
involved in the production of mild, controlled, socially transmitted
notions about purity and the need for magical ritual. But it seems that
the salience of a particular range of ritual themes to do with hidden
danger and noxious contact [72] and a susceptibility to derive rigid,
emotionally vivid sequences of compulsory actions from such themes
[55], could be spectacular cultural by-products of neural function.

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Table 2. A framework for a cognitive neuroscience of religionp

Gods and spirits as agents: they do things and react to ones
behaviour
Goal detection1
Agents objects that react to others1,2
Gods and spirits have perceptions, beliefs
Ordinary mind reading2
The dead as supernatural agents
Ordinary mind reading2,5
Social relations with dead people2,3

System independent from Theory-of-Mind [41] from infancy [42], needs no

human-like agent [43]. NC: involvement of STS in inferring goals and other social
cues from static displays [44], modulation of sup. PC in detecting agency from
reactivity [45]. Questions: Is activation of such systems involved in representing
non-directly perceived agency?

Specific system [46], selective impairment [47,48]. NC: joint activation of medial
FC [49,50] and regions dedicated to social cues [44], imitation [51] and emotional
empathy (see below). Questions: How do these systems generate inferences
about non-physically present agents (imaginary companions, spirits)?
3

Sacredness, purity, pollution and taboo

[normal] fear of contagion4

Face-recognition [52] and agency cues (above). NC: those of social agency and
person files [53]. Questions: Do dead bodies produce disjunction between social
agency and animacy detection? How does this connect with emotional effects of
mortality?

Rituals protect against invisible danger

[normal] fear of contagion4

Gods as interested parties in moral judgement; moral

empathy
Detection of emotional states5
Moral feelings and empathy5

Gods and spirits really there despite no physical presence

[normal] imaginary companions, off-line interaction2,6
[pathological] thought insertion, delusions2,6

Contagion-avoidance system: early developed [54], like magic [55], specific

emotions [56]. Joint activation of Ac, Caud., OFC [57]. Questions: How does
magical ritual modulate this activity? Are contagion-related cues sufficient?

Empathy, emotion and off-line simulation, NC: those of emotional states in

general (including sub cortical structures, amygdala, thalamus, also involved in
moral feelings [58] together with STS for social cues. Questions: Is moral feeling
neurally (as well as phenomenologically) distinct? Does moral feeling presuppose
others a well as own viewpoint on action?
6

Gods and spirits give and receive (sacrifice, protection)

Social exchange, trust-signalling, cheater-detection2,7
Mystical experience, fusion with supernatural agent
Altered states, meditation8

Monitoring of self-non-self distinction in action [59,60] breaks down in particular

pathologies [61]. NC: disjunction between insula and inferior PC activity for selfinitiated vs. non-self initiated action [62], also later-alization of inf. PC activation as
effect of imitation vs. being imitated [51]. Questions: Is limited
suspension/modulation of such activity involved in real presence of
supernatural agents?

7
Inferential systems detached from general mental logic [63] and cultural factors
[64], possible selective im-pairment [65]. Questions: Are the emotions triggered
specific to these systems? How are the emotions transferred to non-physical
resources?
8

NC: Probably specific modulation of sub-cortical structures and TC [66].

Questions: Does phenomenology of such states constrain conceptual
descriptions of supernatural agency? (see Box 1)

The argument presented in this article is that religion does not involve a specific mental faculty or neural system. A cognitive neuroscience of religion would require a twostep reduction. First, different aspects of religion (left column, bold) require diverse inference systems (left column, below headings) also found in non-religious contexts.
Second, each inference system corresponds not to a single neural system but to the joint activation of a family of systems (right column). Abbreviations: NC: neural correlates;
FC: frontal cortex; PtdCho: parietal cortex; STS: superior-temporal cortex; Ac: anterior cingulate; OFC: orbito-frontal cortex; Caud.: caudate nucleus; TC: temporal cortex. All
numbers refer to main text bibliography.

support this interpretation: (1) when people explain

salient misfortune without mentioning supernatural
agents, they still assume agents as causally involved
(e.g. in witchcraft accusations, a human agent is said to
use special techniques to bring about misfortune); (2) the
way people connect misfortune or protection on the one
hand and gods, spirits or ancestors on the other is
generally in terms of social exchange, that is, in terms of
services and goods given versus received. They attribute to
supernatural agents an intuitive logic of social exchange
[29] that is active in non-religious contexts.
Fear of death is also often described as the origin of
religion (although all not religion is reassuring; see
Table 1). Social psychologists know that reminding people
of their mortality triggers a whole variety of non-obvious
cognitive effects (e.g. a punishing attitude towards social
deviance, ethnic-racial intolerance or stereotyping, illusory consensus) [30,31]. The mechanisms responsible are
not yet properly understood [32] but they probably
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highlight culturally acquired notions of powerful and

protective agents [7].
The association between death and concepts of
supernatural agency is most obvious in death rituals.
However, rather than commenting on mortality, these
rituals are usually mostly concerned with what to do
with corpses. This is partly to do with the fear of
contamination, apparently a salient aspect of magical
thinking and ritual (see Box 2). Dead people also create a
discrepancy between the output of different mental
systems. On the one hand, systems that regulate our
intuitions about animacy have little difficulty understanding that a dead body is a non-intentional, inanimate object [33]. On the other hand, social-intelligence
systems do not shut off with death; indeed most people
still have thoughts and feelings about the recently dead.
This discrepancy between incompatible intuitions about
a single object might explain why recently dead people
are so often seen as supernatural agents [6]. The effect of
these different mental systems is also visible in

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culturally widespread distinctions between the social

part of the dead person that is still sentient and the
impure and dangerous decaying body [34].
Evolved disposition or multiple by-product?
Some aspects of religion have a long history, as documented by Palaeolithic drawings of imaginary objects [35]
and apparently ritualized burials in both humans and
Neanderthals [36]. Most attempts at an evolutionary
account of religion have proved unsatisfactory because a
single characteristic identified as crucial to the origin of
religion is not in fact general (Table 1). The attempt to find
the single evolutionary track for religion is another
manifestation of a general urge to identify the single
mechanism that motivates religious thought or makes it
plausible to believers. However, evolution by natural
selection is certainly relevant to understanding the
functional properties of each of the distinct mental systems
described here [37]. The way animate beings are detected,
agents represented, moral intuitions processed or contagion feared are all plausible outcomes of evolutionary
processes. There is now a growing body of evolutionary
thinking that connects the following elements of a
potential evolutionary framework: (1) features of religious
concepts; (2) experimental evidence for underlying cognitive systems; (3) clues about the genetic basis of these
systems; and (4) precise hypotheses about the reproductive
advantage provided by possession of such capacities [6,7].
Belief and neuroscience
People do not generally have religious beliefs because they
have pondered the evidence for or against the actual
existence of particular supernatural agents. Rather, they
grow into finding a culturally acquired description of such
agents intuitively plausible. How does that happen? We
know a lot about the external factors that predict differences in religious adherence [38] but we know little
about the cognitive processes involved, about the difference between imaginary companions and supposedly real
protective ancestors. The cognitive findings summarized
here offer a speculative explanation.
First, religious representations activate a variety of
specialized (non-religious) conceptual capacities. In this
review, I mentioned the effect of several of these systems,
and many more are certainly involved. None of these
systems handles explicit judgments about the existence of
spirits, for example, but all of them run off-line inferences
on the assumption of spirits being around.
Second, belief in supernatural agents (like many other
explicit beliefs) is a high-level, conscious and metarepresentational state. That is, people are aware of their
assumption that ancestors are around (by contrast, they
also assume that objects fall downwards but are not
necessarily aware of that assumption). In other words,
explicit beliefs of this kind are interpretations of ones own
mental states [39].
It is a plausible hypothesis in cognitive neuroscience
that some mental systems, possibly supported by specific
networks, are specialized to produce such explicit, relevant interpretations or post-hoc explanations for the
operation and output of other mental systems [40].
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Perhaps the impression that elusive agents really are

around is an interpretation of this kind, as a result of the
coordinated activity of many automatic mental systems
[6]. In this view, spirits and ancestors would be seen by
some as plausibly real because thoughts about them
activate theory-of-mind systems and agency-detection
and contagion-avoidance and social exchange. Whether or
not this interpretation holds will depend on progress in the
cognitive neuroscience of religion (see Table 2).
Religious believers and sceptics generally agree that
religion is a dramatic phenomenon that requires a
dramatic explanation, either as a spectacular revelation
of truth or as a fundamental error of reasoning. Cognitive
science and neuroscience suggests a less dramatic but
perhaps more empirically grounded picture of religion as a
probable, although by no means inevitable by-product of
the normal operation of human cognition.
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